This is what happens when you jump to conclusions. First conclusion I jumped to was that I had no more room for plants, until I looked at this space (room for at least fifty), and the second conclusion was that this soil was hard as a rock. I tried digging in the soil here, using a cheap shovel someone left in the front yard some years ago (the tip of the shovel is now concave, which doesn’t happen with the heavier-bladed Bulldog tools), and it was a snap. This had been a garden before, so the top eight inches or so were easy to dig in. I needed to fill the hole with water to get down deeper with the shovel, and the water drained away in just a few minutes.

Some people say that if a hole doesn’t drain in thirty minutes that’s bad; others say two hours, or twelve hours. The soil here is so dry it hardly matters one way or the other. There were no earthworms in the soil I dug out.

I happened to have a nice Vitex agnus-castus that I was going to jam into any space I could find, until it occurred to me that empty spaces have some potential. The vitex won’t become a tree here, which is okay by me. I don’t need any more trees. The Cotoneaster multiflora in the corner has become a tree, but got seriously pruned when the fence went in. I was daydreaming about moving to California the other day, but there, everything becomes a tree. Sometimes living in a less gardening-friendly climate has its advantages.